McPain

It has been suggested that McCain will attempt to abandon his reasons for pushing us in to war in the first place (I suppose it has become undefendable as a political position) and concentrate on the success of the 'surge', which he wholeheartedly supported and even takes credit for, and his 100 year war platform which includes unflinching, uncompromising and continued support for the war on terror even as our allies damp down the rhetoric whilst seeking new ways to define and confront these unique problems.

As an aside Matt Yglesias has a nice summation of where we are right now and how we got here, I particularily like this graf:

The trouble is that ever since 9/11, we've adopted a set of incredibly harmful and counterproductive policies (the war in Iraq has, of course, been considerably more costly in terms of lives lost, people crippled, and stuff destroyed than was 9/11). Rather than taking a focused, disciplined approach to a dangerous-but-manageable situation, the Bush administration has engaged in a series of flailing overreactions that have, improbably, actually made it possible for a relatively small group of people to dramatically alter the course of the world without expending any vast resources. The whole thing's been a disaster.

McCain, of course, wants to perpetuate the 'mistakes' of the Bush administration and utilizes pretty much the same rhetoric and palpably false set of metrics to allude to our success in Iraq and our ongoing confrontation with Islamofascistdeadenders. It is a policy that refuses to adapt as the situation itself becomes more and more complex, one could add that because of the initial ill-conceived and fraudulant nature of the reasons for going to war it was always going to be this way and we should now just concentrate on working with what we've got and try to make the best of a bad situation and that is undoubtedly McCains tack. However, our recent military success in Iraq, or rather the temporary respite from all-out civil war the surge may or may not have accomplished, cannot be measured by the decrease in violent attacks upon US servicemen or Iraqi civilians in this given period, as much as McCain would like that to be so, it can only be taken as a whole with the reasons we are there in the first place as a prime integer and the overarching requirement of political or national reconcilliation as the end goal. This, McCain has, so far, refused to ruminate on and it is blatantly obvious why. His argument for perpetual war relies upon the fallacies and presumptions that we are winning or we can never surrender, the fact that these two statements are mutually exclusive is the conceit of his position. Who exactly are we winning against in Iraq and who would we be forced to surrender to in the GWOT?

Let's take a look, firstly his rash announcements on the political improvements in Iraq have now been exposed as, perhaps, a little premature, with the deBaathification law being denounced by Sunnis and heavily criticized by most arab and western observers as unworkable and the recent 'bundle' of laws outlining the framework for future Iraqi regional governance, hailed by McCain and this administration, being vetoed. So far, democracy in Iraq has anything but flourished and this can be attributed to how this administration initially conceived of Iraq's evolution. Democracy was not the goal, Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz imagined a compliant client state run by a trusted lackey, a Chalabbi or an Alawi, someone they could rely upon to have their best interests at heart and someone they could 'govern', not exactly the imprimature of freedom expressed in numerous fireside chats on the subject. This initial flaw in pre-war planning and the off-the-cuff mechanism for control of the country cost us time and allies both in Iraq and in the international community, it extended the occupation and allowed the insurgency to gather steam and Al Qaeda to infiltrate and instigate and may ultimately have contributed to the political will being sucked out of Iraq's nascent leaders as they battled each other for turf. Political compromise may never happen and a war torn future for Iraq seems plausible if not inevitable. McCain has yet to respond to these developments and has, so far, not shown the ability to think creatively on the causes and possible solutions apart from the fact that he can see us there for 100 years.

Secondly, and lastly, the military situation in Iraq, surge or no surge, is a tenuous bi-product of various coincidences and good old fashioned grunt work. That the Mahdi Army has pretty much sat this out is indisputable and without that singular happenstance perhaps the entire surge dynamic may have been different, remember the conventional wisdom was that this was going to be pretty bloody with an uptick in American deaths whilst the battle raged. There was no battle, at least in Baghdad, Sadr City remained quiet under the cease-fire and other neighborhoods completed ethnic cleansing, whilst the insurgency proper and the remaining elements of AQI slunk off to greener pastures namely Dhiyala Province. The Awakening Councils, whilst being paid (but now on strike), provided a new security dynamic in Al Anbar, a province we had all but given up on, and managed to force AQI out of the region only to resurface, once again, in Dhiyala. Reports from the field continue to paint the Iraqi army as anything but a well oiled machine with still only passing reference made to them in any operations and then only as back-up to the men doing the real fighting, US GI's and Marines. That our armed forces are once again relying upon large bombing campaigns is never a good sign, it means vast areas are still too dangerous for us to venture into and the easiest way to deal with that is to bomb the crap out of it and be damned the collateral damage, not exactly a hearts and minds winner. Now with the surge a yearling and the expected drawdowns to begin this spring, we are told the troop reductions will not be as large as first described in fact, our troop numbers will remain higher than at any time since the invasion, what does that tell you about the success of the surge?

All told, the political situation is a mess and the surge success is open to 'serious' debate, it's a pretty harsh reality for a guy running solely on his supposed knowledge and experience in this arena. If you're not willing to concede that we have major problems in Iraq and as far as you are concerned, we are winning and yet will never surrender, you can see where your credibility is eventually going to be severly questioned, even by an uninformed layman like me.